A warm, heartfelt novel that’ll get stuck in your head like your favorite love song.
A small-town gardener with big dreams reunites with her ex-boyfriend, a famous alt-country singer, in this sweet second-chance romance.
Sandy Macintosh imagined hundreds of different scenarios in which she’d run into her ex-boyfriend Hank Tillman, but being covered in dirt in the soda aisle of her local grocery store wasn’t one of them. The last time she’d seen him was eight years ago…with his new wife. Before Hank was a married country-music star, he and Sandy were high school sweethearts, bonding over a desire to venture beyond their small town of Baileyville, Ohio. An aspiring artist, Sandy hoped to follow Hank to college in Massachusetts, until a scholarship mishap forced her to attend a local community college. Fearing that she would hold him back from his big break, Sandy ended things and has stayed in Baileyville ever since: “I’ve been letting my roots grow deeper and deeper here in town, so deep that they’re now all tangled and gnarled far below the surface.” For the past 16 years, Sandy has worked hard to make peace with the life she was given, buying her own greenhouse and developing a knack for gardening. But seeing Hank—who’s now divorced and thinking about moving back home—threatens the fragile surface of her contentment, and when he volunteers to help Sandy raise funds for the Baileyville Street Fair, she can’t help but wonder if she could finally allow herself the happiness she deserves. Winfrey’s romance is sweet as honey, and Sandy’s long-awaited journey to living out her dreams is touching and gratifying. Better yet, Hank is the quintessential kindhearted golden boy: “His eyes showed me everything I loved about Baileyville and everything I dreamed about in the outside world….Those blue-gray irises sparkled with the gently swaying flowers of my present and the skyscrapers of my dreams.” With hilarious best friends like Honey and Shelby and memorable oddities like Hotpants Ed, Sandy and Hank’s quaint country town feels larger than life.
A warm, heartfelt novel that’ll get stuck in your head like your favorite love song.Pub Date: Aug. 2, 2022
ISBN: 978-0-593-33343-3
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Berkley
Review Posted Online: May 24, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2022
Light on plot and heavy on bolstering traditional gender norms as the ultimate goal for both men and women.
A Seattle woman meets a Chicago businessman as she flies home from a visit to a friend, and her small act of kindness blossoms into more.
Maisy Gallagher is barely making ends meet. With her father’s unexpected death a few years earlier, she dropped out of nursing school to help out in the family’s jewelry store, working with her uncle. Her older brother, Sean, also moved back home so he and Maisy could help their mother and their 10-year-old brother, Patrick. When Maisy offers a ride to a rude businessman who sat next to her on the plane, she’s just operating on the kindness her grandmother instilled in her. That businessman, Chase Furst, turns out to be an incredibly wealthy banker; he’s flown into Seattle to make funeral arrangements for his mother, to whom he hasn’t spoken in years. Sparks fly in this gentle and predictable romance that leans heavily on long-distance and class-divide tropes. As with many of the author’s books, Christianity and the characters’ reliance on God’s will—as they wait and see what happens next—play a large part, as do traditional gender roles where women cook, clean, and only work in paying jobs until they have children at home to take care of. The author does offer a lighter touch when it comes to the painful ways alcoholism can destroy family relationships, with an understanding of the regret that can weigh on every family member.
Light on plot and heavy on bolstering traditional gender norms as the ultimate goal for both men and women.Pub Date: April 28, 2026
ISBN: 9798217091676
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: Jan. 19, 2026
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2026
A romance that could have used significant rethinking.
Childhood friends, almost-sweethearts, a misunderstanding, and a funeral.
Blair Lang and Declan Renshaw were best friends who went on one date before a disagreement and an accident sent them in different directions after high school. Now Blair is back from college to be with her great-aunt Lottie, who’s dying, and to support her single mother in small-town Seabrook, California. Finding a job at a coffee shop puts her in the path of her former boyfriend, since he turns out to be its owner. Can the two get past their mistakes? The novel uses the popular second-chance romance trope, but Pham fails to energize it through interesting characters. Blair’s grief over her great-aunt’s death and her plan to help her mother are overshadowed by internal monologues about her feelings, the way her friends aren’t paying attention to her, and the novel she plans to write. Declan’s distinguishing characteristic, besides being a former high school quarterback, is his skill at building birdhouses. Unsurprisingly, the couple doesn’t have much chemistry; when they embrace, their “bodies meld like…memory foam.” The wooden characters, unusual word choices (“conglomerate of pedestrians,” “litany of plants”), and odd turns of phrase (“tension melting from his eyebrows like butter melting in a warm pan”) are almost enough to obscure the lack of plot development. What passes for stakes is easily defused when Blair comes into an inheritance that saves her from working as a consultant at Ernst & Young in New York—so she can write a romance novel.
A romance that could have used significant rethinking.Pub Date: March 3, 2026
ISBN: 9781668095188
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Atria
Review Posted Online: Feb. 16, 2026
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2026
© Copyright 2026 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
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